- Vavilov does radishes.
- “How would you describe the smell and taste of a fresh white truffle?“
- “The gene … is in an identity crisis.”
- “The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old.”
- “He slid her gently into a nylon sack and hung her from a scale on which she clocked two kilograms, then slid her out and into the V of a varnished plywood measuring board, where she lay quietly, like a metre-long slab of tenderloin.”
- “Activists” buttonhole Obama.
- The Afghan pomegranate to hit supermarket shelves.
EU legalizes funny-looking fruits and vegetables
Today marks a small victory for agrobiodiversity in Europe. Ok, a very small one. But you take your victories where you can.
Ah, the yoof of today!
On one side of the internet, a World Bank livestock specialist asks about projects dealing with young people in agriculture and rural development. And way over on the other side, an expert on security and geopolitical issues discusses the wider ramifications of a “story about wind turbines on school ground that provide most of school’s need but also a lesson on the local generation of energy to impressionable kids.” School gardens, anyone?
A key advantage for emerging economies: young demographic profiles. That means the turnover on conventional wisdom is relatively fast—as in, a good 15 years later and the bulk of the population can’t remember the old and bad ways and think only in terms of the new paradigm.
Sure, but as another article out at the weekend showed, there’s a long way to go.
Forget the stock market, invest in watermelons
When we say that local varieties are valuable — and should therefore be conserved — we usually mean that they have rare and useful traits. We don’t generally mean that they actually cost a lot of money to buy. But that’s emphatically the case for Densuke watermelons in general, and the one that’s just been sold in particular.
Nibbles: Creole cooking, Cattle, Greenhouses, Cartograms
- Seychelles’ “living botanical herbarium of Creole Culture.”
- Kerala tries to save Vechur cattle.
- Terra Madre day 3: Tom ♥ Vandana.
- Pix of how intelligent greenhouses can be used to grow huge vegetables. I wonder if these technique can be applied to regenerating accessions in genebanks
- Don’t you just love cartograms?